Espresso Italian Classics
Story of a
Story of a
Blackcap
Storia di una capinera
Translated and introduced by Idara Crespi
Pre-order Kindle — $4.99
Paperback available March 2027
Storia di una capinera
Translated and introduced by Idara Crespi
The Kindle edition is available now for pre-order. The paperback edition goes on sale March 15, 2027.
A young novice returns from her convent school for one summer and falls in love. Her family sends her back. She writes letters. That is all that is left to her: letters, addressed to the childhood friend who represents everything the convent walls shut out.
Giovanni Verga's Storia di una capinera — the story of a blackcap, named for the small bird whose song was said to be a kind of weeping — was the novel that made his reputation, published in 1871 before the darker verismo fiction for which he is now best remembered. Written entirely in letters, it is formally exquisite and emotionally overwhelming: the voice of its narrator, Maria, is one of the most distinctive in 19th-century Italian literature, and watching it darken across the pages of the novel is an experience that doesn't leave the reader easily.
The novel has been read in Italy for over a century and a half. It has never received a worthy English translation. This Espresso Publishing House edition is the first.
This edition includes an original introduction by the translator placing the novel and its author in their literary and historical context.
Giovanni Verga (1840–1922) was born in Catania, Sicily, into a landowning family, and came of age in an Italy in the process of becoming a nation. He published his first novel as a young man and spent the next two decades moving between Sicily, Florence, and Milan, absorbing the literary currents of his era — Romanticism, scapigliatura, and finally the French naturalism that would transform his work.
The mature Verga is the author of I Malavoglia (1881) and Mastro-don Gesualdo (1889) — stark, unsentimental novels of Sicilian peasant life that established him as the central figure of Italian verismo and earned him a place in the European realist tradition. D. H. Lawrence admired him and translated him. He has been compared to Hardy and Flaubert.
But Storia di una capinera is the Verga that comes before all that: the Romantic Verga, the one still capable of writing with open emotion about love and confinement and loss. It is the novel that first made him known across Italy, and it has a claim to readers that his later, harder masterpieces do not quite make in the same way.
Idara Crespi was born in Milan and grew up between Italy and Canada. She studied Journalism at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary and came to translation through her work writing about arts and culture. She is the founding publisher of Espresso Publishing House and the translator responsible for the Italian catalogue.
Her translation of Francesco Mastriani's The Blind Woman of Sorrento — the first complete English translation of that novel — was published in March 2026. Story of a Blackcap is her second translation for Espresso Publishing House.
This Espresso Publishing House edition is a new translation made directly from the original Italian source text. It includes an original introduction by Idara Crespi placing the novel and its author in their literary and historical moment, along with a translator's note on the particular challenges of rendering Verga's epistolary voice in English.
Available in Kindle ebook and paperback. Kindle edition available for pre-order now. Paperback at launch, March 15, 2027.
Giovanni Verga · Translated by Idara Crespi · March 2027